Safeguarding Health through Infection Prevention

The Safeguarding Health through Infection Prevention (SHIP) research group is led by Professors Jacqui Reilly and Gordon Ramage who have established a strong relationship between research and its application to infection prevention, diagnostics and management in the National Health Service (NHS) and the wider Healthcare Sector.

As a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including nurses, microbiologists, and epidemiologists, we are committed to developing evidence-based clinical practice - while working in partnership with the public, patients, clinical staff, service management and commercial partners - to safeguard against infection and enhance the quality of patient care and improve population health.

Infection prevention research has been undertaken by researchers within the SHIP group for over 20 years, which has accounted for outputs of over 500 peer-reviewed manuscripts and a very successful result in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). REF is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions.

We provide evidence of effective measures to prevent, diagnose and manage infections nationally and internationally, through our partnership working with national organisations in the UK, such as UKHSA, and by collaborations with international organisations, such as WHO, and industrial partners.

The current work streams and lead researcher for each stream are as follows:

• Antimicrobial Stewardship - Dr Valerie Ness
• Applied Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Interventions - Dr Lucyna Gozdzielewska
• Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) Epidemiology and Economics - Professor Jacqui Reilly
• Microbiology of HAI and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) - Professor Gordon Ramage
• Drug Discovery and Biofilm Control – Dr Ryan Kean